


Ariadne

by earlgreytea68



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Inception Reverse Big Bang Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 08:50:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8483119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: Waking up.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for this amazing art by ameluz71! http://i.imgur.com/c75oKGV.jpg

This is the story of how I met myself. Helped along by a guy named Arthur. 

But I’m getting ahead of my story, maybe. 

Except that it’s hard to say how the story begins. It begins like this: Waking up, in a room. I suppose, if you really stop and think about it, every story begins like that, waking up. That’s what Arthur says, anyway. Arthur says waking up is when life starts, and it’s important not to forget that. Arthur has complicated reasons for why he thinks stuff like that, but you see how it’s confusing when you wake up and the first person you see talks like _that_ , you know? It’s like, Chill out, it doesn’t have to be philosophy 24/7. 

So my story begins with waking up. More importantly, it begins with Arthur. I guess a lot of my stories used to begin with Arthur. And to me it’s true that he’s the more important part of the experience. 

I woke up, and I saw Arthur, and Arthur said, “Sorry, I know that was abrupt, but we’ve got to leave now.” 

I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no idea what was happening. I didn’t even know who he was. The fact that he was Arthur came about only later. At the moment he was just an attractive man in a very nice suit, holding out a hand to me. “What?” I said, not knowing what else to say. Probably I was supposed to have something to say, but I didn’t know what it might be. Or, _was_ I supposed to have something to say. Who knew? 

“We have to go,” said the man who would turn out to be Arthur. He sounded bitingly impatient. It’s a tone of voice I know well now, but at the time I was like, Who the hell does he think he is? “We have to go _now_.” He grabbed my hand, pulling me up bodily. 

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I protested, digging my heels in, because this didn’t seem like a good idea. There wasn’t much I knew but I felt like I knew you weren’t supposed to just go off with random men. “I don’t even _know_ you.” 

Arthur had been dragging me bodily behind him. There were three other people in the room, all of whom were shouting things I didn’t understand, and Arthur was snapping back at them, and then he drew to such an abrupt halt that I walked straight into his back. 

He turned back and looked down at me and said, “What?” 

“What?” I said defensively, not sure what startling thing I’d said to make him stop like that. 

And then someone started shooting a gun at us.

“Oh, fuck,” said Arthur, pulling me in to tuck up against him as he crouched over and kind of shoved us behind a desk. And then he pulled out a gun and started firing back. 

I stared, wide-eyed. “What the _fuck_?”

“Ari,” Arthur said patiently, aiming the gun and shooting as if it was nothing alarming, as if he did this every day. Who the hell _was_ he? “Tell me what was happening in the dream.” 

“What?” I said. “What dream? We are in the middle of a _literal gunfight_ , and you want me to talk about my dreams? What is this, a therapy session?” 

“No,” said Arthur grimly. “I would not be a good therapist. That’s what you tell me, anyway.” 

“When do I tell you that?” I asked. Not that I doubted this was true, because probably a good therapist didn’t stand up and casually cuff his gun against an encroacher’s head, sending his neck snapping back and him plummeting to the floor. 

“Okay,” said Arthur calmly, as if none of that had just happened. “We can go now.” 

Well, I didn’t really want to stay in the warehouse of gunshots with what was possibly a dead body, so I went with Arthur. But I said, because I still wasn’t sure about this, “Did you just kill that guy?”

“Hopefully,” said Arthur. “That was the objective.”

“Why were you killing him?” 

“Because he was trying to kill us.” 

“He was trying to kill _you_ ,” I pointed out. 

“Us. Get in the car, Ari.” 

“Is that my name?” I asked, making the sudden connection. He’d called me it before, of course. Ari. I tried it out in my head. It sounded weird. But it seemed weirder not to know my name. People usually knew their names, right? People didn’t wake up not knowing what their names were. 

Arthur looked at me over the roof of the car we were standing next to. He looked completely inscrutable. “That’s your name,” he said. “Ariadne.” 

“Do you know your name?” I asked uncertainly. 

“My name’s Arthur,” he said. “Get in the car.” 

It didn’t seem like there was anything else to do. 

***

“We have to talk about what happened in the dream,” Arthur said. He was driving very sedately, obeying every traffic law. Which was alarming, since we were in one of those crowded cities where nobody else followed any traffic laws. 

“Is this how you drive?” I asked, watching six scooters careen perilously close to us in efforts to cut us off. 

Arthur shrugged. “It’s how I’m driving today. My mind is on other things. Like why you don’t know your name.” 

“Yeah, that’s weird, right?” I said, distracted from how Arthur’s careful driving was going to get us killed. “Where are we?” 

“Cairo,” he answered. 

“Is this where I live?” 

“No.” 

“Is this where you live?” 

“I live with you,” Arthur said. 

This gave me pause. I gaped at him, studying him critically. “Wait, like _that_?”

A smile twitched at Arthur’s lips. It showed off a ghost of dimples. “Like that,” he said. 

“Well done, me,” I said.

Arthur laughed. “It’s true,” he said. “I’m an incredible catch. Basically you tell me all the time how incredibly lucky you are that I deigned to—”

“No, I don’t,” I said, because that didn’t sound like me. Whoever I was. 

“No, you don’t,” he agreed, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Good. You knew that much.” 

“I just knew that I wouldn’t…” That was so confusing that I dropped it. “What are we doing in Cairo?”

“Working.” 

“Jesus,” I said. “What do we do for jobs?” 

“It’s complicated,” said Arthur. 

“It’s what I do for a living, I bet I can understand it,” I retorted. 

Arthur said, “We invade people’s dreams to steal their secrets.”

I mulled this over. Then I said, “We do what?” 

Arthur sighed and said, “We need help.” 

***

“Wait,” I said, when it became clear Arthur was driving to the airport. “What are we doing?” 

“We’re going to the airport.” 

“Yeah, I see that. What are we doing at an airport?”

“Going home.” 

I was suddenly frightened. It was weird, I’d stopped being frightened at some point, but I couldn’t just get onto an airplane with this guy I didn’t know. What if this was my home, and I couldn’t remember it? Where was he taking me?

“Okay,” Arthur said, parking the car and turning to me. “You’re wearing a messenger bag.” 

I was, it was true. 

“Open it,” he said. “I’ll tell you. You have a passport in there. It’s American, because that’s what you are. Your name is Ariadne Smith and your birthday is February 2 and you were born in Toledo, Ohio. You’ve got a cell phone in there. Your passcode is 1103. That’s our anniversary: November 3. You should look at the pictures. You’ll see we live in Paris. You’ll see we live in Paris _like that_.” He said this last drily. 

He was right. He was spot-on right with everything. The passcode opened the phone and the gallery was full of pictures, full of pictures of Arthur, full of pictures of me with Arthur, full of pictures that weren’t exactly safe for work. 

I lifted my eyebrows. “Oh,” I said. “Pretty sure those are my breasts.” Weird that I felt like I could recognize those, when everything else felt confused and uncertain, but I really did feel like I recognized them. 

“Those are your breasts,” said Arthur. “At least, I hope they are.” 

“So if those are my breasts, is that your—”

“Can we go inside the airport now?” asked Arthur, with a hint of a blush. 

The blush was delightful. I grinned at him. Maybe, I thought, I could see this. Me and Arthur, in Paris, _like that_. “This could all be a huge setup,” I pointed out, figuring I should make one last stand for logic and reason. “This could all be a big trick.” 

“Why would I be tricking you into thinking you were someone else? Why would I have set up this elaborate plan to steal your memory and whisk you away to Paris and, what, make you my kept woman?” 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty hot.” I held the phone up as proof. “I could see a guy in your position wanting to do that.” 

“A guy in my position?” echoed Arthur. “You think I couldn’t get you on the up-and-up? You think I’d have to resort to subterfuge?”

No. Looking at him it was pretty clear he could have gotten me pretty easily on the up-and-up. It was pretty clear he could have pulled me with fairly minimal effort, to be honest. He was hot, and he seemed smart enough, and he was reasonably funny, and he was kind of take-charge, which was something I’d always kind of liked, I’ll be honest. No, it seemed completely realistic to me that I was with this guy. 

It seemed, suddenly, abruptly, _right_. 

“Okay,” I heard myself say. It was the first time I experienced the magnetic pull Arthur could have, the persuasive power of him. Arthur can make the craziest things seem perfectly reasonable. I think it’s something calming at the heart of him. Nothing fazes Arthur. And even at that moment, knowing nothing about him, I knew _that_ , from how calmly he’d acted so far. And it drew me in irresistibly. The steadiness, I thought. That steadiness could be addictive for someone like me. 

Whoever I was, I sensed that to be true. 

“Okay, I’ll go to Paris,” I said. 

***

“It’s weird,” I said, sitting next to Arthur on the plane. He’d taken the window seat without even _asking_ me. I couldn’t tell if that’s because I preferred aisle seats or because he’s just that kind of a jerk. 

“What is?” he asked, not really looking up from _The Economist_. Yeah, he was reading _The Economist_. That’s Arthur for you. 

“Having amnesia,” I said. “I mean, that’s what I have, right? It’s weird.” 

Arthur, after a second, closed his magazine and looked at me. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you have. What do you remember?” 

“Not you,” I said bluntly. 

“I gathered that,” Arthur replied wryly. 

“And I didn’t know my name. And I don’t think I know…me. Like, I’ve been trying to remember my parents and I’m kind of drawing a blank…?” I looked at Arthur hopefully. 

“You have lovely parents,” Arthur said. “Your mother is Marianne and your father is Bob and last year they spent Christmas with us in Paris and your mother wept in front of the Mona Lisa, if that tells you anything about the sort of lovely people they are.” 

It maybe did, a bit. I frowned. “But, like, I know what the Mona Lisa is. How can I understand that reference but I don’t remember my parents?”

“I don’t know,” said Arthur. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know how much I should tell you or not tell you or what I should do.” 

“Well, let’s make a decision, then,” I said. “I think you should tell me everything.” 

“I think I should wait until we talk to Miles.” 

“Who’s Miles?” 

“Someone better at this than I am,” said Arthur. 

I lifted my eyebrow. “There’s someone better at this than you are?”

Arthur smiled. “I’m going to remind you that you said that, later.”

“When’s later?” 

“When you get your memory back.” 

I looked at him for a second. “You think I’ll get my memory back?” 

He searched my face. He had dark eyes, this weird addictive blend of sharpness and puppy-dog-ness. Everything about Arthur was a little weird and a little addictive. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.” 

I believed him. He’s an easy guy to believe, is Arthur. 

I leaned my head back against my seat and looked past Arthur, at the sky I could see through the window. 

Arthur went back to his magazine. 

I said thoughtfully, after a while, “My parents are named Bob and Marianne and they named me _Ariadne_? What’s up with _that_?”

Arthur laughed. 

***

Another weird thing about my amnesia: I knew what Paris was. I knew what Arthur meant when he said “Paris.” I knew about the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc d’Triomphe, and the Champs Elysees. I knew all of this, but I could not remember what it was like to see Paris. I leaned over Arthur to press my face at the window, gaping at its approach. 

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. “I should have given you the window. You normally don’t like the window.” 

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just, like, have never seen this before. I mean, I have but I…” I fell silent, watching Paris reveal itself beneath me. “Wow,” I breathed. “It’s…beautiful.” 

“It is,” said Arthur, and something about his inflection had me turning my head to look at him. 

He gave me a small smile and said, “It’s the only way to see Paris.” 

“What is?” 

“For the first time.” 

“That’s a good line.” 

“It’s from a movie. A movie you love. Cary Grant.” 

“Cary Grant,” I repeated, the name ringing a bell somewhere in my head. 

“I will only be slightly offended that you remember Cary Grant a bit more than you remember me. Actually, maybe I’ll be flattered, because when it comes to you, being second to Cary Grant is actually pretty good.” 

I said, “So we live in Paris. Is it nice? Do we love it? We must love it, right? 

“We love it,” said Arthur. “We love croissants and _chocolat chaud_ at the bakery down the street, and the way the light hits the buildings, and the way champagne in Paris tastes a thousand times better than anywhere else.” 

“You make me want to live in Paris,” I admitted. 

“Good,” said Arthur. “I’d like that.” 

***

Miles turned out to be a professor at a university. 

Arthur said, “Does it look familiar?” 

“Did I go here?” I asked. 

“You were Miles’s student.” 

I absorbed this. The name didn’t sound familiar to me. “I was his student in stealing things from people’s dreams?” 

“No, you were his architecture student.” I was following Arthur through the halls of the building, and he kept opening doors for me. I couldn’t tell if the move was automatically gallant or just his way of keeping track of me. 

“What’s an architecture professor going to know about amnesia?”

“Well, obviously he’s not _just_ an architecture professor,” said Arthur. “He also knows about dreamsharing. In fact, he helped pioneer dreamsharing.” 

***

Miles was frowning at me like a particularly troublesome specimen. 

I guess I was. 

“She just woke up like this?” he said to Arthur. 

Arthur had been doing all of the speaking so far. I was a little resentful of that. 

“I’m right here,” I pointed out. 

Miles amended his question. “You just woke up like this?” 

“I guess,” I said. “That’s the first thing I remember: waking up.” 

“What happened in the dream?” 

“I don’t remember.” 

Miles looked at Arthur. 

“I didn’t go in the dream,” Arthur said. “I was keeping watch topside. Which, it was a good thing I was, because it was messy and I had to pull them out of the dream abruptly, but she’s the only member of the team affected like this. Everyone else claims to be fine.” 

“Who were you using as a chemist?” asked Miles, looking at me narrow-eyed. 

“Beth. And I’ve never had any problem with her before. And I asked her and she said the mix was straightforward. We used it for the testing and I went down with them and everything was totally fine. _Ari_ was totally fine. Until now.” 

“Hmm,” said Miles, and went on just looking at me. 

“So have you ever heard of it before? Waking up with amnesia?” Arthur asked. He sounded, for the first time since I had met him, impatient, like he was growing weary now of the situation. He’d been supernaturally tolerant of everything so far but the first time I really heard the thread of anxiety of a man whose significant other suddenly didn’t remember him. It wasn’t that I’d doubted Arthur’s story, because I hadn’t, but I found myself really starting to believe that he was telling the truth when he claimed to love me. There was a loss of coolness to him that betrayed how much he was invested in the outcome of this conversation.

“It wasn’t entirely unusual in the old days,” Miles said. “I mean, not common, but there were cases. But once the Somnacin mix was balanced, you stopped hearing about it. You’ve been in dreamshare a long time and you’ve never heard of one, have you?” 

There was a moment of silence. “No,” Arthur admitted, and I could tell how much it pained him to admit it. 

“How long have you been in dreamshare?” I asked him. “Longer than me?” 

“Arthur trained you in dreamshare,” Miles told me. 

I think I’d assumed we were the same age. Now I was rethinking that. “How old are you? Are you robbing the cradle with me here?” 

“This sounds like a conversation you shouldn’t be having in front of me,” remarked Miles. “Have you called Dom?”

Arthur shook his head. “No offense, Miles, but generally Dom’s response to these things is to freak out and make things worse.” 

“Yes,” agreed Miles. “He is not entirely level-headed. Still, a call might not hurt. He might have knowledge of things we don’t know about.” 

“What if he doesn’t?” asked Arthur. 

“Well, I would recommend Ariadne stay away from Somnacin, wouldn’t you?” 

“Of course,” Arthur bit out, “but what _else_ can we do?” 

Miles looked between us. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you should start by telling her how old you are. And then maybe you can ask her out for a drink. What did you do to win her over before?” 

***

Arthur’s hands were tight around the steering wheel of the car. Our car, I guess. 

It was a nice car. 

“Are we rich?” I asked after a second. 

“Dreamsharing pays well,” said Arthur. “We’re very good at it. And we’ve been doing it for a while.” He was speaking shortly, not the Arthur I had grown used to in the few hours I had become reacquainted with him. 

I didn’t know what to say to make it better. I looked out the window and fiddled with the scarf I was wearing. Eventually Arthur parked in a fancy underground garage and then I followed him into an elevator that opened into a lovely apartment: old bones that had been remodeled with new flash. I wonder whose style this was, if it was a blend of both of our styles. 

Arthur was moving into the kitchen, loosening his tie as he went. “Do you want anything?” 

“What do I usually have?” I asked. 

He barked unamused laughter from the kitchen and came back out with a bottle of red wine and two wineglasses. 

I said, “It’s going to be okay,” because I felt like I should. 

He looked at me and frowned, and then he sighed, “Fuck,” and passed a hand over his forehead. Then he sat on the floor by the coffee table and poured out the wine and looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding much calmer. “You’re the one who just lost your whole life, and _you’re_ telling _me_ it’s going to be okay.” 

“It might be easier for me,” I said, sitting on the floor next to him and taking my glass. “I don’t know what I lost. You do.” 

“I guess,” said Arthur glumly into his wine. 

I regarded him for a moment, and then I said, “What do you think? Think you can win me over a second time?” 

Arthur sipped his wine and looked at me speculatively. And then he grinned a grin that made me shiver a little bit and also made me think he might have already succeeded in winning me over a second time. 

Maybe there really are soulmates. Maybe Arthur is mine. Maybe that’s why I could sit there knowing nothing else about my life but the fact that it seemed very true I loved this man and he loved me. 

***

Arthur told me about him: his nonexistent childhood taking care of a sick mother and two little brothers after his father had walked out; his military career in quest of a college education; the college education he never bothered to get because it turned out he was a dreamsharing genius, as the military found out; how he realized, once he saw that the military had a very different life planned for him than the one he’d wanted, that he had to get himself out; how he’d walked out of the military with a black-market PASIV machine that put him at the center of a bidding war between the world’s most ruthless criminals; how he’d managed somehow to come out of all of that with control of the PASIV, which he had never relinquished, viewing his special expertise with it as the only thing keeping him alive; how he had met Miles, who was working on dream architecture, and then Miles’s daughter Mal, and then Dom Cobb, who later married Mal, who then still later died. 

How he met me. 

He told me how we met, the first job we worked together, our first kiss. 

“You trickster,” I said. “You stole that first kiss.” 

Arthur looked unrepentant. “I did. But I didn’t steal the second one.” 

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. By now it was dawn. We’d sat up talking all night. The wine was long gone, and so was the hodge-podge dinner of cheese and crackers that Arthur had put out. “So that’s you, and then you become us. Tell me about us. Tell me about me.” 

Arthur was silent for a long time, looking at me. And then he said slowly, “I don’t know. I think maybe that’s for you to find out for yourself.” 

***

This is the story of how I met myself. 

It never came back, the Ariadne who had been there before, and sometimes I think Arthur misses that, references some shared point of our past and then catches himself. Sometimes I think it saddens him. 

But most of the time, I can tell, it doesn’t. Because I turned out to be pretty awesome, this me I am now, if I do say so myself. 

And Arthur—he tells me he agrees.


End file.
